Miswanting:

Here's a question worth sitting with for a second: think of the last thing you desperately wanted: a promotion, a relationship, a new phone, a vacation. Did getting it feel the way you thought it would? For most of us, honestly, no. It felt good for a while, and then it just… didn't. That gap between what we expect to feel and what we actually end up feeling has a name in psychology: miswanting.

Coined by psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson in their influential 2000 paper, Miswanting: Some Problems in the Forecasting of Future Affective States, the term describes our surprisingly poor track record at predicting what will actually make us happy. We're not bad at wanting things, we're bad at wanting the right things, or at least, at knowing in advance how much a thing will actually deliver. Gilbert and Wilson argue that at least three problems get in our way: we imagine the wrong version of the event, we use the wrong theory about what makes us happy, or we simply misread our own feelings once we get there. It's a small idea with big consequences, because so much of life: the career we chase, the house we buy, the relationship we stay in or leave rests on forecasts about our future happiness that turn out to be shaky.

The Treadmill You Can't Get Off

Let's start with one of the strangest findings in happiness research. In 1978, psychologists Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman tracked down 22 major lottery winners (people who'd won anywhere from $50,000 to a million dollars) and compared how happy they felt to a group of non-winners, and separately, to a group of people who'd been paralyzed in accidents. What they found should make anyone pause before buying a lottery ticket as a happiness strategy: the winners weren't any happier than the people who hadn't won anything. Stranger still, the winners reported less pleasure from ordinary, everyday things such as chatting with a friend, reading a magazine, hearing a joke than the non-winners did. Meanwhile, the accident victims, though understandably less happy overall, weren't nearly as devastated as most people would predict, and they still found real pleasure in daily life.

Why would winning a fortune make you enjoy your Tuesday afternoon less? Brickman's team proposed a contrast effect: once you've experienced the peak of winning a million dollars, an ordinary compliment or a good sandwich just can't compete anymore, everything else gets measured against that spike and comes up short. This is the mechanism behind what's often called the hedonic treadmill; that is, we adapt to whatever new baseline we reach, positive or negative, and before long, we're right back to roughly the same level of contentment we started with, just chasing the next thing. Ask yourself: has a raise, a new car, or a new phone ever kept you happier for longer than a few weeks? If your answer is no, you've experienced the treadmill firsthand.

Overestimating Everything: The Impact Bias

Closely related to miswanting is something researchers call the impact bias, which is our tendency to overestimate both how intensely and how long we'll feel something, whether the event is good or bad. Wilson and Gilbert put it plainly: whether people overestimate how good or bad they'll feel, how fast those feelings will hit, or how slowly they'll fade, the common thread is that we consistently overrate how much power a future event will have over our emotional lives.

Think about the last time you dreaded something, a hard conversation, a failed test, a breakup, and imagined it would wreck you for months. Did it? Usually, the sharp edge of the feeling dulls within days, not months. The same goes in the other direction: we assume a big win will float us for a long time, and instead the glow fades within days. One of the reasons this happens, according to Gilbert and Wilson's later work on focalism, is that when we imagine a future event, we zoom in on it and forget that dozens of other, smaller things will also be competing for our attention and emotions once we actually get there. We picture ourselves the day after the wedding, the promotion, or the breakup as if nothing else in life will be happening, but of course, it will.

There's also a more hopeful flip side to this bias that's easy to miss: we tend to underestimate our own resilience. Studies on affective forecasting have repeatedly found that people recover from negative events such as job loss, illness, or romantic rejection faster and more completely than they expect to, largely because we're bad at predicting how quickly our minds will make sense of what happened and move on. So the next time you're bracing for the worst, it might help to remember that you're probably underrating your own ability to cope.

Comparing Ourselves into Misery

Now, here's where things get more modern. A lot of what fuels miswanting today isn't just internal, it's social. We don't form our desires in a vacuum; we form them by watching other people, especially now that "watching other people" mostly means scrolling through a feed of their best moments.

Research on Facebook and Instagram, and other social platforms, backs this up in a fairly consistent way. Several studies have found that heavier social media use is linked to more frequent social comparison, and that this comparison, particularly the "upward" kind, where we measure ourselves against people who seem to be doing better, tends to fuel envy and lower life satisfaction. One quasi-experimental study of Facebook users found that using the platform increased social comparison, which in turn reduced users' reported happiness, especially among people who believed their friends' lives were going unusually well. Other researchers have shown that this kind of envy mediates the link between social media use and depressive symptoms, and that people with lower self-esteem to begin with are especially prone to it.

This connects directly back to miswanting: when we see a curated highlight reel of someone else's vacation, promotion, or relationship, we don't just admire it, we start wanting a version of it for ourselves, assuming it will deliver the happiness it appears to. But we're comparing our full, complicated inner experience to someone else's edited outtakes. It's a rigged comparison, and yet it still manages to reshape what we think we want.

So What Can We Actually Do About It?

If miswanting is baked into how our minds work, is there any point trying to correct for it? Gilbert and Wilson, along with later researchers, suggest a few genuinely useful habits, nothing dramatic, but worth trying:

Ask people who've already been there. One of the more counterintuitive suggestions from affective forecasting research is that surveying someone who's currently experiencing the thing you're considering: the new job, the move, the breakup, often predicts your future happiness better than your own imagination does. We resist this advice because we assume our situation is special. It usually isn't.

Notice the treadmill in real time. Simply knowing that the thrill of a purchase or achievement will fade on a predictable schedule can soften the disappointment when it does, and can make you think twice about chasing the next upgrade purely for the emotional payoff.

Ration the comparisons. Given how consistently social comparison shows up as a driver of envy and lower satisfaction, some of the simplest interventions are also the most obvious: less passive scrolling, more real engagement, and a conscious reminder that what you're seeing is a highlight reel, not a full life.

Anchor to values, not outcomes. Desires tied to intrinsic values such as connection, competence, and meaning tend to hold up better over time than desires tied to status or possessions, precisely because they don't depend on a single peak experience that the treadmill can flatten.

The Takeaway

Miswanting isn't a character flaw or a sign that something's wrong with you, it's a basic feature of how human prediction works. We're not equipped with a reliable crystal ball for our own emotions, and that's true whether we're picturing a lottery win, a new relationship, or just a better version of the life we see online. The real value in understanding miswanting isn't that it lets you escape it entirely, you probably can't, but that it gives you a bit of healthy skepticism the next time a desire shows up promising to be the thing that finally makes you happy. Maybe pause and ask: is this something I actually want, or something I've been talked into wanting?

References

Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917–927.

Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2000). Miswanting: Some problems in the forecasting of future affective states. In J. P. Forgas (Ed.), Feeling and thinking: The role of affect in social cognition (pp. 178–197). Cambridge University Press.

Krasnova, H., Wenninger, H., Widjaja, T., & Buxmann, P. (2013). Envy on Facebook: A hidden threat to users' life satisfaction? Wirtschaftsinformatik Proceedings.

Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2003). Affective forecasting. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 345–411.

Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131–134.

Contact

Questions or thoughts? Reach out anytime.

Email

Phone

gomezmt@currentdiscussions.blog

© 2025. All rights reserved.